Eric Jones, CF columnist for SitePoint.com, has posted a column entitled "Making the Case for ColdFusion". Eric is an experienced PHP developer, who was "asked to switch from my happy PHP world to the dark side of ColdFusion", and learned that by using ColdFusion he could "do things faster, cleaner, and -- believe it or not – more cheaply than I could with PHP". The article is at http://www.sitepoint.com/article/making-case-coldfusion.
Hope you enjoyed/are enjoying 4th of July weekend!
While I've been a big CF advocate for the past couple of years, I do have a few concerns:
- We've had a lot of performance and stability problems with Cold Fusion MX 6.1. With just 1.2 million page views per month (40,000 page views per day), we've had major stability problems that have been very frustrating to overcome and resolve. Query caching in Cold Fusion seemed buggy - and prevented us from making the kinds of optimizations we wanted. Our site would regularly restart every 1-2 days. This is a fairly low traffic site relatively. Hot fixes from Macromedia didn't always seem to address our problems.
- Over time, I'm becoming more respectful of the open source movement and am about to dive in to the PHP/MySQL world. I expect PHP 5.0 to offer a lot of what CF does. So, it's harder for me to push new people into the CF world now away from PHP.
- While Eric makes a good point about Blue Dragon's free CF server, it's always a version behind - currently doesn't offer CFC (components) for free and I have no experience with it in regards to compatibility or performance. Cost-wise, we've been relatively happy with the CrystalTech hosting services - 1/2 off for nonprofits - so you can host CF applications for less than $40/mo.
Posted on my blog at http://www.idealog.us
http://www.newatlanta.com/products/bluedragon/inde...
As for being a version behind, here are some features BlueDragon 6.1 offers now, that are being promised for Blackstone in 2005:
- standard WAR/EAR deployment on J2EE servers
- source-less deployment (compiled CFML pages)
- serialization of CFCs
- CFIMAGE tag
So the question of which product is a "version behind" is unclear, and probably not the right way to look at it.
As for compatibility and performance, you should give it a try.
The free BlueDragon Server edition is being offered directly as an alternative to PHP to keep people using CFML instead. You really owe it to yourself to try it while you're also investigating PHP 5.0.
Vince Bonfanti
New Atlanta Communications, LLC
Will you guys open source it? That would put huge pressure on Macromedia to do the same... or at the very least - open up the open source arena to a broad # of CF developers.
No, we have no plans to release BlueDragon as open source.